How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

How would a very smart, well-capitalized competitor attack the company’s core business? How could it take advantage of digital platforms to exploit weaknesses or skim off the most profitable customer segments? What is the company doing to disrupt its own business? Is cannibalization or revenue loss a frequent reason to kill off potential innovation? Is there an opportunity to build a platform that can offer increasing returns and value as usage grows?

Do company leaders use your products regularly? Do they love them? Would they give them to a spouse as a gift? (This obviously isn’t applicable in a lot of cases, but it’s a powerful thought experiment.) Do your customers love your products? Or are they locked in by other factors that might evaporate in the future? If they weren’t locked in at all, what would happen? (Interesting corollary to this question: If you forced your product people to make it easy for customers to ditch your product for a co...

When you go through your pipeline of upcoming new major products and features, what percentage of them are built on unique technical insights? How many product people are on the senior leadership team? Does the company aggressively reward and promote th...

Is hiring a top priority at the C-suite level? Do top executives actually spend time on it? Among your stronger employees, how many see themselves at the company in three years? How many wo...

Do your decision-making processes lead to the best decisions, or the most acceptable ones? How much freedom do employees have? If there is someone who is truly innovative, does that person have the freedom to act on his ideas, regardless of his level? Are decisions on new ideas based on product excellence, or profit? Who does better in the company...

It starts with education, and not just the traditional K–12, college, and university formats. Education is going to change, and governments should favor disruption over incumbency (currently, they tend to do just the opposite). Technology platforms will help us identify our individual strengths and weaknesses with greater precision, and provide us with educational options customized to what we want to do. As the purveyors of public education, governments can aggressively pursue this model of customized, flexible, lifelong education, particularly for post–high school teens and adults.

We see most big problems as information problems, which means that with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved.